New low power personal communications products such as the Motorola CT-2 System, require a large number of base stations in order to provide wide area service coverage. In these type products, a service provider is required to put forth a monumental effort to ensure the functionality of their system. One very troublesome problem, is determining the functionality and integrity of the base station's antenna after the initial installation of the system. Many service providers spend a great deal of time manually inspecting antennas at each base station for damage due to vandalism and natural deterioration. This process consumes a great deal of resources and time as providers maintain up to 10,000 stations or more. Furthermore, simple existing methods for measuring return loss for a CT-2 or PCS type systems will be subject to a substantial amount of out -of- band interference due to the close proximity to high power wide area systems such as 800 megahertz trunking systems or cellular systems. Therefore, a need exists for an economical and practical method and apparatus for obtaining a diagnostic return loss measurement at the station's antenna port to determine the integrity of the antenna. Such a method would preferably allow the service provider to remotely examine the functionality of the antenna without raising from radio frequency systems operating in adjacent frequency bands.